


A Poststructuralist Analysis of the Ways I Love You

by wispenwillows



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Explicit Language, F/M, Fluff, Fluff and Crack
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-06
Updated: 2017-07-26
Packaged: 2018-10-15 08:00:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10552858
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wispenwillows/pseuds/wispenwillows
Summary: he has daddy issues and so does she, which is why one would expect them to get along a lot better than, say, yelling at each other about literary theory in front of a room full of terrified lowerclassmen. a loosely connected series of ficlets.





	1. (1) love is a set of socially codified behaviours. so is hate.

 If you asked him who he hated most, it’s unlikely he would have mentioned his father. It might even be unlikely his father would have been at the top of the list, because there are bigger fish to fry: a fascist president, a cowardly university board of directors, a hypocritical mayor who always pushed for too little, too late.

But there was a reason Enjolras insisted on being addressed by his family name. Why he wanted every one of his arrests tied to the family business. To his father. Enjolras, Enjolras— _Student Leader Enjolras Arrested For Trespassing At Sit-In, Scion of Business Empire Maced At Riot, Rabble-rouser With Ties to Businessman Guillaume Enjolras Arrested at Protest_ —it was impossible to get away from. So if each of his arrests was mud flung onto his father’s name, well, then, wouldn’t it just have been all the sweeter?

If you asked her who she hated the most, it’s very likely she would have mentioned her father. The fall from daddy’s angel to daddy’s puppet to daddy’s partner-in-crime was a long one, and it wasn’t a story she was shy about sharing. Because she shared it often, and well—not to other people, perhaps, but to herself, as a reminder. Because no matter how hard the city was, home was harder.

It was why she’d given up her father’s name. There was no reason now that she’d left home forever to make a go of college that she should be saddled with the name of a man who had weighed her down with his poison and his spite. Thenardier was a word she’d struck utterly from her vocabulary, except on the forms she hadn’t yet the money to change legally.

So yes. He had daddy issues. So did she.

Which is why you might think they’d get along better than they currently were.

As it was, however, she was standing ( _standing_ ) atop her desk, one foot on her chair and the other balanced rather precariously on the table, yelling at him. He’d given up with the pretense that this was a classroom altogether and had taken a dry erase marker from the professor, who was not paid _nearly_ enough to deal with this, and was pacing to and fro before a class of freshmen and sophomores staring in abject horror at their upperclassmen role models.

Was this, they thought, the level of discourse their seminar professors expected of them? Because they weren’t sure they could muster up the kinetic energy. Certainly, they had the potential, but to fight over a novel? Who had the time?

“You are an _idiot_!” she was saying. “Your shitty structuralist analysis is surface level at best and the only thing you’re really doing is denying individuals their agency!”

“Oh, I’m denying, is it? _I’m_ denying? Your _entire_ argument is _premised_ on a _complete_ lack of understanding that people live lives _shaped_ by social structures that _dictate_ their relationships and the way they relate to one another.” His curls were in disarray and his glasses had slipped to perch at the very end of his long nose, a fact that had more than one freshman anxious.

Well, more anxious.

“ _That’s not my premise_!” The chair tilted a little off the ground, and the sophomore in her line of fire (or collapse, as it were) felt his heart catch in his throat. “Don’t blame me if you’re intellectually _vapid_ and completely unable to survive in the 21st century.”

“ _Intellectually vapid_? Oh my god, did Professor Steinberg tell you to say that? Because I swear to god you sound _just like her_ ––”

“Oh do I now? _Do I_? Guess what, it might be because she has _a point_ . God, I can’t believe she’s advising _you_ on your thesis.” She leapt lightly off the table and stomped up to him. She was a full half-foot shorter, but she seemed to tower over him. Perhaps because her shadow was so large.

“What, as opposed to you? Because you’re so much more intellectually rigorous? Because you want it more?” He was sneering now, an ugly thing that mapped strangely onto his delicate features.

“The fuck is _that_ supposed to mean?”

“What it means, Eponine Jondrette, is that you’ve never actually _worked_ for a thing in your life. You think that shouting at something’s enough, and maybe if you’d actually done anything _real_ with your shitty intellectualism, Professor Steinberg would have taken you on!”

“‘Anything real.’” She scoffed. The tarnished rose that hung off her choker quivered indignantly. “Like attend one of your shitty protests? That’s _real_?”

Professor (“Just call me Bruce”) Webber had been staring, slightly open-mouthed for at least fifteen minutes of this exchange before he caught up to the fact that his only slightly lewd literary analysis lecture (a close reading of Blake’s _The Fly_ ) had gone woefully off-course. It took him another five minutes to realise that despite the volume of their voices, he was supposed to be the authority in this room. And another five minutes to actually put his foot down.

“Enough!” His voice cracked. He cleared his throat and reached over onto the podium, flipping the lights on and off. “ _Enough_!”

Enjolras broke off with a very unbecoming squeak, but no one laughed. He was pointing a dry-erase marker accusingly under Eponine's chin. She was standing on tiptoes, and god knew where she’d managed to find a book titled _A Midsummer Night’s Queef_ , but she’d swung it over her head, _Anne of Green Gables_ style, because by god, no one had ever accused her of playing fair.

“Thank you for a most––” Professor Webber was having trouble with his words, which was strange, because he was also the author of three midlist literary fiction novels that compared breasts to globular mounds of pure white snow, doughy bags of pleasure, and licentious apples of temptation (respectively). He settled on “––invigorating dialectic on modes of analysing 20th century American poverty literature, but I must remind you this is a course about pre-modern British poetry. And we _have_ ––we have rules concerning classroom decorum, by which I hope you will abide!”

Eponine lowered the book––as it turned out, a thin volume of feminist revisionist poetry she hadn’t yet made up her mind about––and raised a finely-arched brow.

“If we can’t keep a discussion decorous and on-topic, I’m afraid I will have to ask you to leave the classroom.” Actually, he was hoping they’d leave the course––the college, maybe even the country––altogether, but he was a professional. He wasn’t going to say that.

“That’s perfectly acceptable to me, Professor,” Eponine drawled, leaning over to pick her tattered black Jansport off the ground. “See you Thursday.”

Oh, horrors.

Enjolras nodded curtly, and took three precise steps toward the desk he’d colonised, at the front and centre of the classroom, in order to pick up his bespoke vegan leather knapsack. “Thursday,” he said.

Professor Webber’s blood curdled.

The freshmen looked at their retreating figures with some combination of awe and horror before the door slammed blessedly shut on Enjolras’ heel. Was this how college was supposed to be?

It’s not like they knew any better. It was their first ever 8AM, on the Tuesday after Labour Day.


	2. (2) past performance is the best indicator for future behaviour

Here is a comprehensive list of Cosette Fauchelevent’s problems:

 

  1. The Baileys was running dangerously low, and she had nothing to spike her coffee with.
  2. She needed something to spike her coffee with because 10AM was much too early to be awake when you had no classes scheduled and your internship doesn’t begin until the end of September
  3. Her boyfriend was being a real Pillsbury Doughboy and not responding to text messages that requested further delineation of dinner plans for Saturday night with the cafe crew.
  4. Her roommate of four years, who on any other day she would swear she loved, was complaining, top-volume, about certain blonde boys who may or may not be currently texting her about a town hall he wanted her to come protest.



 

“ _Eponine_.”

“Yeah?” The voice, nonplussed. The enunciation, clipped. The verdict: awake. Too awake.

“It’s ten-thirty.”

“Yeah.”

Cosette cracked open an eye to take in the vision of her nest-headed roommate sitting on their shared fuzzy carpet, eating a cup of applesauce. She groaned and fell back onto the pillows. “It’s ten-thirty in the _AM_ , Nina.”

“Yeah.”

“Oh my god.” It wasn’t even worth it at this point. There was a total of one (1) thing she could do, and the thing was to let Eponine tire herself out with the talking. Only she was pretty sure she knew who’d taken her Baileys.

It started three years ago, this shitshow. The way most things start where those two were concerned.

There are news stories, you know, about deer, or moose, or elk or whatever other horned and horny males that start getting a mite too territorial and end up falling in rivers and freezing to death because they couldn’t untangle themselves from each other. Of course, she wouldn’t call either of them horned, or horny, or in the case of Nina, even male, but it was, as an image, decidedly apropos.

Sophomore year had brought them into each other’s orbits, a fact that Cosette was sure they had both been regretting since the moment they’d collided, but one that Cosette couldn’t necessarily regret, for a few reasons:

  1. Enjolras had come part and parcel with Marius, and she wasn’t planning on breaking up with Marius anytime soon, unless the boy didn’t text back within the hour.
  2. Sophomore year had been the one where Cosette and Nina hadn’t really been great friends, and she really hated to say that it was about a boy, because boys sucked, but it was about a boy.
  3. Okay, it wasn’t really about a boy. It was about Cosette feeling shitty that she was dating a boy Nina liked first, and then Nina feeling shitty that she felt so shitty about Cosette dating a boy she liked first, and then Nina feeling shitty Cosette felt shitty, etc., et. al.
  4. But what it meant was that Cosette and Nina spent more time than they did with each other freshman year when they’d been assigned to each other as roommates, because Nina hung out with her best friend (Marius) who’d wanted to hang out with her (Cosette)
  5. But it also meant that his friend (Enjolras) came over quite often because (a) Marius was a lamb who couldn’t handle hanging out with a girl he liked on his own and (b) when they did come over he (Marius) wanted to hang out with her (Cosette) so that he (Enjolras) had to hang out with her (Nina)
  6. Which ended up being good for him (Marius) and her (Cosette)
  7. But not so good for him (Enjolras) and her (Nina)



It was fine, at first. They had roughly the same language and a similar set of interests––id est yelling. Well, it hadn’t been yelling back _then_. It’d been good-natured bantering to pass the time they spent being sexiled. They’d sat in the common area, on the dinky plastic futon, crouched over a shared tub of Ben  & Jerry’s Rocky Road. She’d toe her socks off and spread herself over two-thirds of the space and he’d be sitting, quite rigid, on the remaining third.

Easy topics, like tea vs. hot chocolate, Coke vs. Pepsi (“They’re both corporations, Nina, they’re both pretty morally bankrupt”), _Steven Universe_ vs. _Gravity Falls_ had graduated into Hugo vs. Dumas, Dickens vs. Gaskell, intellectual production of Western academia vs. the Global South, in the words of Edward Said, looking back. 

The trouble had come with the latter three, though, because she was an English major (with a focus on postcolonial studies) and he was an anthropology one (with a focus on ethnographies of Third World development), and they had distinctly different. Well. Ideologies. And a decidedly similar love of Professor Steinberg.

The first time Cosette realised that it wasn’t a good idea for Marius to bring Enjolras within 50 metres of her roommate was when she’d had to wrench herself out of, quite frankly, a _damn good_ make out (she didn’t want to know how her hands got so far down Marius’ pants, and she didn’t really care to find out) because the noise outside had risen to alarming levels.

At first, she thought they were fucking.

It took until her hormones and adrenaline had calmed down and the rush in her ears to quiet for her to realise that those weren’t the sounds of people fucking.

Not normal people, anyway.

It was yelling. Loud yelling. The kind that compelled their next door neighbours to come knocking and ask them to please, _please_ shut up. And also did you really have to talk about Foucault _outside_ of the classroom? Some of us have class in the morning and didn’t need a refresher course the night before.

Cosette went over to Marius’ place now.


	3. (3) ghosts of futures past

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this one was much more my Usual Style of Writing(TM) but i'm sorry it's not lighthearted anymore

If he looked more properly contrite, maybe she’d be able to find it in herself to forgive him.

But he was never contrite; he could never be contrite, not even sitting in a holding cell with zip ties around his wrists, scrunching his long nose up at a piss stain on the dirty floor. He had the face of an angel and the splendid fury of one, too. She considered this, watching as the officer unlocked the door and beckoned for him to come out. She considered this, watching him square his shoulders and set his jaw, as his tousled hair formed a halo around a face so cold it seemed cut by God himself.

She considered this, wondering when she would have the luxury of firm conviction.

“Don’t make a habit of it,” she told him as he approached, watching the haughtiness slipping from his shoulders when he realised it was her. An easy, impish grin replaced the smirk, hard lines easing into fluid grace, and if her heart gave a little thump at the shallow dimples that welled up into his smile, no one had to be the wiser.

“Wasn’t planning on it,” he said, signing his belongings out and slinging the atrocious knapsack back across his torso. “Could Combeferre not make it?”

“Everyone else was busy.” Which was one way to put it. Marius and Cosette were out of town on some weekend trip with some of the other resident lovebirds, which meant that the only people still left in town were Combeferre (radio silent to study for midterms), Feuilly (working), and Grantaire (could not be fucked). So when the police department had called Marius, Marius called Nina, and Eponine, with greatest trepidation, hiked up her skirts and marched down to the police department to post bail with the money Monsieur Enjolras had wired over.

Because they both had daddy issues, right, but only one of them really had to face the consequences. He liked to joke that he looked forward to getting expelled, but it was only because it was a joke to begin with. If he got expelled today, Harvard or Princeton ot Stanford would take him in the minute it took to process the funding to erect the Guillaume Enjolras Library of Legal Studies and Research. Nina had fifty dollars to last the next week before her work-study paycheck came in, which she needed to stretch to cover the two weeks before the rest of her loan money came.  Many things in the world were unfair, but this was what stung most of all: to be such similar people in a world that treated them so differently.

“Hey, wanna grab some ice cream?” he asked, nudging her. “My treat.”

He did not say it was his father’s treat, but it amounted to much the same anyways. “Only cos you promised to pay,” she agreed. He snickered.

As they walked down the twilit boulevard, she snuck glances at him from the corner of her eyes. His yellow hair caught the last of the sunset, reddened by the blanketing dark. Every now and again his eyes would be shadowed by the overhead streetlights, his profile silhouetted by fluorescent storefronts.

He snuck glances too, at the way her long fingers twisted into each other, and the rigid set of her shoulders, like it was her against the world. His heart began to ache, but he didn’t know why. “You’re so tense,” he said. “Don’t worry about it; it wasn’t that big a deal.”

“Of course you wouldn’t think it is.” It was a shock how bitter her voice was. She’d stopped, just outside the light, the shadows so dark on her face that he couldn’t see her freckles.

He paused, confused, and ran a hand through his curls. “It isn’t, though. I’ve been arrested tons, and I’ve never been charged. It’s not so scary.”

“Maybe that’s because you’re not the kind of person who needs to be afraid of cops.” She was looking up at him now.

His stomach lurched, because he thought he’d be better than someone who wouldn’t consider what it would mean for her to walk down to the police department. Hadn’t considered what it would mean for someone who couldn’t afford to pay bail. He could feel blood rushing to his cheeks, and he wasn’t sure what to say except, “Nina…”

“Don’t.” It was a knife of a word.

They walked the rest of the way in a silence made strange by the fact that they’d never shared it before. The space between their positivities felt hollow, and the hollowness felt wrong. He didn’t know how to make it right again. A strange equilibrium, two objects knocked out of orbit but still trapped in each other’s gravities. Once more, he pushed a hand through his hair, wincing when his fingers caught in the tangles.

What was there to be made right when he couldn't be sure what right was anymore?

**Author's Note:**

> So...this is a little different from how I usually write?  
> Um, I'm also really, really, really sorry at bringing _A Midsummer Night's Queef_ into the world. The alternate title I came up for it was _Sluts for Shakespeare,_ which I don't necessarily think would be all too much better. It's supposed to be a White Feminist(TM) type book, if that helps.


End file.
